How nonprofits came together to provide immediate relief and ongoing support.
The commandment to love thy neighbor is best taken literally—and when disaster strikes, loving your neighbor becomes more important than ever.
Just over a year ago, on the night of September 27, 2024, Hurricane Helene made landfall in Florida. The Category 4 storm had been brewing in the Gulf of Mexico for several days, generating winds of up to 140 miles per hour on the approach to the coast. As it careened through the Southeast and up the Atlantic Seaboard, Helene wreaked destruction throughout Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee, and even Virginia. In total, the damage was estimated at $78.7 billion, making Helene the fifth-costliest Atlantic hurricane on record. Today, communities throughout the region are still reeling and slowly recovering from the devastation the storm left behind.
The damage was widespread, and so was the response. In the following weeks and months, disaster relief teams flocked to the area to help those who had lost their homes and livelihoods. While government agencies offered assistance and funding support to affected areas, nonprofits brough a human touch to relief efforts. Some of the most impactful relief efforts were spearheaded by local organizations already entrenched in the communities devastated by Helene.
Experience has shown that effective disaster relief requires strong cooperation between larger-scale efforts and local grassroots organizations, which highlights the importance of subsidiarity. Relief efforts tend to be more successful when conducted by—or at least guided by—members of the local community who know their neighbors and their needs better than anyone else.
Locals affected by Helene faced uninhabitable homes, impassable roads, downed trees, and a complete lack of access to electricity and water—while getting government aid was a slow and painstaking process. To fill the gap, nonprofits stepped in to provide disaster relief, from national organizations such as Knights of Columbus and Catholic Charities to smaller, homegrown nonprofits. Their efforts ranged from providing temporary housing to serving up food, mucking out flooded houses, trekking supplies and generators to the elderly and disabled, and everything in between.
One of the organizations galvanized into action was Team Rubicon, a veteran-led nonprofit that provides disaster relief services around the world. Team Rubicon volunteers arrived on the scene quickly and began clearing debris, conducting recon, and assessing damage. More than 300 volunteers were deployed in dozens of affected communities, clearing out homes so that locals could return and begin rebuilding their lives. They cared for the people affected as if they were family—spending an entire day, in one case, carefully searching the debris of a Georgia woman’s home to recover her veteran grandfather’s burial flag.
The community of Asheville, NC was hit particularly hard by the combined effects of hurricane-force winds and catastrophic flooding. BeLoved Asheville, a nonprofit that had been part of the local community for years before Helene hit, had a clear sense of what their neighbors would need. In the immediate aftermath, Asheville locals were completely cut off from the outside world, without food, water, power, communications, or passable roads. BeLoved quickly developed into a major distribution hub providing life-saving supplies to 15,000 people per day. Volunteers hiked supplies into areas where the roads were blocked, and the organization eventually helped relocate homeless families into RVs and tiny homes, allowing them to remain in the community they called home even amidst the devastation.
When you’ve lost everything, it’s suddenly the small pleasures in life—like a warm meal—that mean the most. Mercy Chefs is an organization that provides meals to victims, volunteers, and first responders in disaster situations. Since Helene first made landfall, Mercy Chefs has been on the ground in affected areas—and it remains there now, serving the families who are still piecing their lives together and the volunteers that are supporting them. Many families are still displaced from their homes, rendered uninhabitable by flooding and falling trees. These families are living in RVs or tiny homes, and many have only rare opportunities to enjoy a home-cooked meal. By partnering with other local organizations, Mercy Chefs ensures that daily hot meals and grocery boxes are available to the people who are rebuilding their lives.
Above all, Helene highlighted the importance of utilizing existing local infrastructure in relief efforts—nonprofits who were already on the ground, serving their communities, had a leg up when responding to the unthinkable.
